Klaviyo Underperforming? 7 Signs to Diagnose and Fix It

You log into Klaviyo, glance at the numbers, and something feels off. Sales are trickling in, but the email channel isn’t pulling its weight. Open rates look low. Clicks look worse. And you have this nagging feeling that the big list you’ve spent years building is just sitting there doing nothing.

If that’s you, take a breath. You’re not behind. Your email just hasn’t had a specialist look at it properly. When your Klaviyo is underperforming, it’s almost never a mystery. It leaves fingerprints, and once you know what to look for, you can diagnose exactly where the revenue is leaking and fix it in the right order.

Here are the seven signs I see again and again with product brands, and what each one is actually telling you.

What does it mean when your Klaviyo is underperforming?

Klaviyo, the email and SMS platform built for ecommerce, is only as good as the strategy running on top of it. Underperforming doesn’t mean broken. It usually means the account was set up once, never touched again, and slowly drifted out of shape while the business grew around it.

Here’s the benchmark to hold yourself to. Email should be doing 25 to 40% of your total revenue. Most brands I see are sitting closer to 12%. That gap, the difference between what email is doing and what it could be doing, is the money on the table every single month.

If email is bringing in less than a quarter of your revenue, the channel isn’t failing you. It’s just been left idle.

Sign 1: Your deliverability score is sitting well below 90

Deliverability is the measure of whether your emails actually reach the inbox instead of the junk folder. Klaviyo gives you a score, and the benchmark for a healthy sender is around 90.

When I take on an account that’s been neglected, I’ll often find that score sitting in the 40s. That means a huge chunk of emails never even get seen, no matter how good the copy is. You can write the best campaign of your life, and if deliverability is shot, it lands in spam.

This is the first thing to fix, always. Everything else (open rates, clicks, conversions) improves once more of your emails actually arrive. The good news is deliverability recovers faster than most people expect when you stop battering disengaged subscribers and send to people who actually want to hear from you.

Sign 2: You have a big list, but most of it is asleep

A large list feels like an asset. Often it’s a liability dressed up as one. The size of the number means nothing if most of those people haven’t opened, clicked or bought in months.

Here’s why it matters. Email platforms judge your sender reputation on engagement. Every time you send to someone who never opens, you’re telling the inbox providers your mail isn’t wanted, and your reputation drops a notch. Constantly emailing people who ghost you actively damages the results for the people who do care.

The fix sounds counterintuitive. You send to a tight, engaged segment first (the people who have done something in the last 90 days), protect your reputation, and then use a genuine reason like a sale to win back the rest. The ones who come back rejoin your engaged group. The ones who don’t were costing you money anyway.

Sign 3: Your click rate is under 1%

Open rates get all the attention, but they’re a vanity metric in a post-privacy world. The number that actually predicts revenue is your click rate, the percentage of people who not only open the email but tap through to your site.

A click rate under 1% is a flashing warning light. Clicks turn into conversions. Conversions turn into sales. If almost nobody is clicking, almost nobody is buying from email, full stop.

The fix here is testing, not guessing. Button wording (short versus long), button colour, placement, even rounded versus square corners. These small things shift click rates more than founders expect. You won’t find the sweet spot in one send, but methodical testing gets you there.

Open rates tell you the subject line worked. Click rates tell you the email worked. Only one of those pays the bills.

Sign 4: Whole flows are earning zero

A flow is an automated email sequence that fires off the back of a customer action, like signing up, browsing, or buying. Flows are the closest thing to free money in your account, because once they’re built they run in the background with no person behind them.

So when you open your account and find flows sitting at zero revenue for the month, that’s a problem you can actually fix. Sometimes it’s a broken trigger. More often the flow exists but the strategy behind it is weak, the offer is wrong, or it’s targeting the wrong moment in the customer journey.

Not every zero-revenue flow is urgent, and that’s an important call to make. Some are genuinely lower priority because customers get captured elsewhere in the journey. The skill is knowing which empty flow to fix next for the biggest return, rather than rebuilding everything at once and burning weeks on the wrong one.

Sign 5: Your flows are doing less than your campaigns

Campaigns are the one-off emails you send (sales, newsletters, launches). Flows are the automations. A healthy account leans heavily on flows, ideally somewhere around 70 to 75% of email revenue coming from automation.

If your flows are bringing in less than your campaigns, you’re running on manual effort. That’s exhausting and fragile. The moment you stop sending campaigns, the revenue drops off a cliff, because campaigns are partly what feed your flows in the first place. They drive people to your site, those people take actions, and those actions trigger the automations.

You want flows carrying the load so the channel keeps earning even in a quiet week. That’s the difference between email that needs you and email that runs without you.

Sign 6: Your pop-up barely converts

The sign-up pop-up is how you turn anonymous traffic into subscribers you can actually email. A submit rate of around 2% is fair but rarely where it should be, and most pop-ups I see are left exactly as they were on day one.

This is one of the easiest wins in the whole account. Swapping a static image for a short GIF, rewording the offer, or tightening the timing can lift sign-ups noticeably. Every extra subscriber here feeds your welcome flow, which feeds your revenue. A neglected pop-up is a slow leak at the very top of the funnel.

Sign 7: Your spam and unsubscribe rates spike when you finally clean house

This one’s a trap, because it looks like a problem and is actually the cure. When you start emailing a neglected list properly, unsubscribes and spam complaints go up. Founders panic and pull back.

Don’t. A higher unsubscribe rate during a clean-up means the people who were never going to buy are removing themselves, which is exactly what you want. You’re paying Klaviyo for those subscribers, and they were dragging your numbers down. Letting them go lifts your engagement, can lower your billing, and clears the way for the people who actually want your emails.

Unsubscribes during a clean-up aren’t lost customers. They’re dead weight removing itself from your bill.

How do you diagnose and fix an underperforming Klaviyo account?

The order matters more than the individual fixes. Here’s the sequence I work in, every time.

1. Deliverability first. Nothing else works until your emails reach the inbox. Send to engaged people, give the rest a real reason to re-engage, and watch the score climb.
2. List health second. Identify who’s engaged, suppress the truly dead weight, and stop paying to email people who never open.
3. Clicks third. Test buttons, copy and design until click rates lift past 1%, because clicks are what turn into sales.
4. Flows fourth. Fix the empty flows in priority order and build the automations you’re missing, so the channel earns on its own.

Trying to chase a sales spike before deliverability is sorted is like flooring the accelerator with the handbrake on. Do it in order, and the results compound.

Key takeaways

• • Email should drive 25 to 40% of revenue. If yours is closer to 12%, your Klaviyo is underperforming and leaking money.
  • A deliverability score well below 90 means your emails aren’t reaching the inbox. Fix this first.
  • A big list isn’t an asset if most of it is disengaged. Engagement, not size, drives your sender reputation.
  • Click rate under 1% is your clearest warning sign, because clicks turn into sales. Open rates don’t.
  • Flows are your free money. Empty flows and campaign-heavy revenue both signal an account leaning on manual effort.
  • Spiking unsubscribes during a clean-up is a good thing. It’s dead weight removing itself.
  • Diagnose in order: deliverability, list health, clicks, then flows.